On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 12:37:30 -0500, Joel Ewing wrote:
>
>Encyclopedia Britannica is complicit in the confusion to this day by
>incorrectly implying in their "Leap Year" entry that in addition to the
>divisible by 4, 100, 400 rules there either is or should be a 4000-year
>exception rule:
>"...For still more precise reckoning, every year evenly divisible by
>4,000 (i.e., 16,000, 24,000, etc.) may be a common (not leap) year",
>
>Over 18 years ago (Nov 1996) EB acknowledged that no such rule exists:
>it was an un-adopted and sub-optimal suggestion by Sir John Herschel
>around 1820. EB has apparently not yet followed their own internal
>recommendation in 1996 "to reword this statement in the future".
>
If I were Emperor of the Universe, I would make the rule:
Every year divisible by 4 except one divisible by 128 is a leap year.
365 31/128 is within one second of the mean tropical year; closer even
than the 4000-year rule.
The unpredictable secular increase in the length of the day makes a
4000-year rule pointless.
-- gil
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